A Consulting Call With My Mentor – Part 2 of 2

On part 2 of this special episode series, Russell continues to give his mentor Mark Joyner some powerful advice. Here are some things that Russell tells Mark, that could be helpful to anyone running a business.

Why you have to find a category you can be king of in order to become a billion dollar business.

How the Expert Secrets book can help you become a charismatic leader, find a future based cause, and a new opportunity to sell.

And how to create a front end funnel to bring people into your software.

So listen to Russell offer sound advice to his own mentor, Mark Joyner, about how he can improve his business.

Full Episode Transcript

Hey this is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you enjoyed the first half of my consultation, or whatever you want to call it, with my original mentor Mark Joyner. I had a good time kind of going through some of my quick critiques and feedbacks, as well as telling a story. And now in the second episode I’m going to go deeper into, I believe, 5 or 6 different things I would really be looking at if I was Mark in my business right now.

And I wanted to share this with you guys, once again, because there are so many lessons that apply to all of you. In fact, a lot of the stuff I’m talking about with Mark in this interview would be the same things that if you were to hire me or just sit with me at dinner or lunch or something and say, “Critique my business.” The things I’m going to share are pretty much the same things I’d probably share with most of you guys as well.

So I hope you take the rest of this podcast just to look back and look at this as if it’s your own personal interview, your own personal consult. And don’t look at it like, “Oh yeah, Mark should do that. Mark should do that.” Look at it as like, “Oh, I should do. I could do that.” And hopefully it gives you a ton of ideas for your business as well.

So with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back we’ll finish up the exciting consultation with Mark Joyner.

Now I’ve got basically six things that I want to go deeper into. And this is stuff that’s a lot more than just, you know, tweak the software, make it easier, takeaway upsells, put yourself out there, be more vulnerable. Those are like messages, but this is like, if we were to sit down and build Simpleology from the ground up today, knowing that your goal, if you someone asked you what your goal was and your goal was to build a billion dollar company. So it’s like, okay, you’re going to build a billion dollar company from this, or maybe it’s 100 million, or whatever, it doesn’t really matter, but knowing that’s the goal, it’s going to shift the lifestyle business which I think, I’m assuming it has been up to this point, to I want to build this thing and make it significant, then there’s some core fundamental things that I found on my journey.

And as you, I’m sure you watched some of my journey over the last decade and a half. I’ve been scatter brained like crazy. In fact, that was my biggest problem, I was doing this and this, and I was all over the place. But in that journey of trying a billion things, I learned some powerful things that became the foundation for Clickfunnels. Some I did strategically, and some I looked backwards in time and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s why that thing worked.” So I’m going to kind of go through some of those things, I hope they help.

Alright, number one. For Simpleology, if you really want this to become a billion dollar play, like a big play, it can’t just be another productivity tool. You have to create a new category for this thing if you’re going to be successful. The book I would highly recommend reading, it’s the best on the market about this concept, it’s called Play Bigger. It’s all about how to create your own category.

So what’s interesting in the book, it talks about how when a company becomes a category king, they become the best. And the category king will suck up like 90% of the business in the category. And then the last 10% that’s still there is fought over by everybody else. All the other companies fight over the last 10%. And again, it’s almost impossible to dethrone a category king.

So think about each company. Who owns music? Who owns, anything? Any category you think about it’s there. There’s Amazon, books. There’s Apple with iPods and music and things like that, and all these different things. But there’s always one category king.

So what a lot of people do is they come into an industry and they’re like, “Okay, who’s the players out there? Who am I competing against?” I saw this recently with, we have a mutual acquaintance who just launched a new company and I respect this person a ton, but it’s interesting. All his messaging is like, “We’re like shopify, but we’re better.” And I’m like, ugh, literally by doing that you are the ones fighting, you become one of the people fighting over the last 10%. Because the category king of ecommerce stuff has been claimed, somebody owns that and you can’t get it. It’s almost impossible to dethrone shopify.

So it’s like, you have to look at that and side step and design your own category. So that Play Bigger book is all about category design. It’s interesting, again, this is one of those things I didn’t know doing it, but looking back I was like, “oh my gosh, that’s why we were successful.” When we launched Clickfunnels there were a lot of things out there, and what was Clickfunnels at the very beginning? It was a page editor. But the difference is there was a page editor category king. At the time it was Lead Pages. Lead Pages was the thing and if we would have come and said, “Hey, we’re the best landing page software in the world.” We would have been competing against the category king that had millions of dollars in funding and it would have been really, really difficult.

But instead we came in and said, “We’re not a landing page, we do, do landing pages, but we’re a funnel builder, and that’s what we are.” And there was nobody else that was a funnel builder at the time.

Same thing, Infusionsoft. If I would have come out and said, “We are the best marketing automation platform on planet earth.” I would have been going against Infusionsoft that was the category king. And so for me to go into that market and try to compete, it’s literally almost impossible to dethrone a category king, unless they do a lot of stupid things. But it would have been a hard uphill battle that we probably wouldn’t have ever won.

So instead we designed our own category, which was like, we’re going to be the category king of sales funnels. And because there’s no one else in there, we automatically by default, we’re the category king. We have that now. And now we have the strategic advantage over everyone else. It wasn’t us building a better mousetrap, it was us building a different thing. It was becoming our own category. And then we were able to grow like crazy.

And what’s cool is the tangential categories will bleed into you. We sucked up all Lead Pages business, we sucked up all Infusionsoft’s businesses, and we now have all those things. And yes, Clickfunnels does do landing pages. Yes, Clickfunnels does do marketing automation. But we don’t sell those things, we sell that we are a funnel builder. That’s what we are. We are the category king of Funnel builders.

And since we launched Clickfunnels there’s been dozens and dozens and dozens of people that have come, but right now, they’re all fighting over the last 10%. And I don’t know if you see it, but I see it every single day, because I get notified by every single person like, “The next Clickfunnels killer is coming out.” It’s like, good luck, you can have the scaps. There’s 10% of the people there who are not going to stick with us, but the rest of the market we own. Unless I do something stupid or the software crashes, we’re going, we’ll maintain being the category kings, it will almost be impossible to dethrone us, just because it is.

So that’s number one, for you now I’d say, what is Simpleology at its core. I look at it and it’s like project management software? Kind of. Is it personal development? What’s the, what exactly is it? What is it the category king of? And I don’t really know, when I look at it, I’m not really sure. The headline’s “A daily ritual that turns your go switch to on, so you have more time to switch off.” So it’s kind of like project management and getting things done, task management. But I don’t really know what it is.

And the problem is there are some really, like project management software, there’s some amazing ones out there, category kings. Some have millions of dollars in funding like Trello. Or there’s people like Base Camp that have made that their thing and they’ve built it so deep and so wide, it’s like, how do you come in and dethrone someone like that? It’s not going to be easy. I mean, near impossible.

So if you’re a task management software or project management software, that’s going to be so difficult and so hard. So it’s like, it’s not saying take those things out of the app, it’s saying what’s the unique thing that you have that nobody else has? What’s your funnel building thing that’s an evolution of what any of the other of the things?

So that’d be my first thing, really spending time figuring that out. What are you going to become the category king in? Because you can identify that and then you can start designing that category, then it can be yours. Now you can own it, now you can go after it, and you’ll suck people in from all these other tools. Like the side tangential competitors, but that’s just like a nice benefit. But that’s not the goal. The goal is “I’m going to become the category king of this.” And I don’t know what that is exactly. Partially because I know a lot of the features of Simpleology, but I don’t know the core message, the core belief, the core thing that you’re obsessed with.

I’ve spent the last decade of my life being obsessed with sales funnels. I’ve literally bought every single person’s product that has ever sold anything on the internet and looked at every funnel. I’m obsessed with it. I can’t click on an ad and not buy everything, just to see what happens on the back side. There’s nobody on planet earth that’s more obsessed with funnels than me, it’s impossible.

So for me, that’s why this became, why it was such an easy thing for us. That’s why we drifted there. Because I didn’t care about landing pages, I didn’t care about marketing automation. I care about what happened on page one, what happened on page two, what happened on page three? That’s what I was obsessed with, that’s what we became the category king with.

So for you, I know you’ve got the software that does these things, but I think that it’s bigger than that. I know it’s bigger than that because I know you. The book Simpleology goes deeper than that. There’s more cool stuff than that in that alone. I’d have you go back and re-read your own book. I recently did that on my own, which is really weird and awkward, but going back to that, and the roots because you wrote that back in the beginning when you were in the most passionate time.

I know you wrote 3 or 4 books around that time, and you told me back after, I can’t remember if it was after the Irresistible Offer, or I’m trying to remember the name of the second one, the second drink of water one. Anyway, I can’t remember which, but I remember you telling me all these books are leading up to this one, which is called Simpleology that you were so excited about.

I would go back and read that and be like, “Okay, when I read this book, what am I the category king of? What is the thing?” It’s not just to-do lists, it’s not making things simpler, it’s something bigger than that. But you gotta figure out what that is. What is that thing? So that’s number one, is becoming a category king. And that’s the core strategic shift, that then there’s a million tactics behind that, that will make it easier, but that’s the core thing.

Alright, number two. After you read the book, Play Bigger, then you should read my book, Expert Secrets. I’m assuming you haven’t read them, maybe you have, but if you haven’t I’m going to give you a quick gist because there’s, it’s really, really important. I think you would love it because the whole book is based and framed around how do you build a mass movement of people.

When we were building Clickfunnels, I remember about that time I went to a network marketing convention for a network marketing company that is a software platform that sends out cards in the mail. I remember going there and there’s like 5000 people and everyone’s going crazy and people onstage crying and I was sitting next to David Frye and Dave leaned over and goes, “Do you see what’s happening here?” and I’m like, “No, I’m so confused.” He’s like, “They’re a software company.” I’m like, “I know, why are people crying about sending out a card? I don’t get this?”

He said, “Because they’re not selling software. They’ve created a movement. That’s why people are here.” And there was a light bulb in my head like, “Oh m gosh, if Clickfunnels is software, we’re going to lose this game. Clickfunnels doesn’t have to be big, it has to be more than that. How do we create a movement?”

And then I went to this whole 2 year long geek out session of how you create a cult, which was really fun. I know you’ve probably read most of the books I read around that topic. But from that, as I did my geek out session I was like, “oh my gosh, there’s the pattern of what creates a mass movement, what creates a cult.” What creates these things to happen, positive and negative. From the negative side of deep, dark, evil cults, to the positive side of things that I believe like Christianity and things like that. The pattern that creates all those things are the same.

So at the opening of Expert Secrets I draw this little triangle and say, there’s three pieces that every mass movement has. So I’m going to kind of go through those three because those three kind of tie back to you.

Number one is every one of these mass movements has a charismatic leader. So for Clickfunnels, I deem myself that person. I’m the person who’s obsessed with this. I need to be out there, I gotta be living it every single day. I remember when you were in Boise and I was in Clickfunnels, I was building funnels, I was geeking out, I sensed, and I don’t know if you said it verbally or not, but I sensed that you were surprised that I was in Clickfunnels all day building stuff in Clickfunnels. I was obsessed with it. I didn’t just make the Kool-aide, I’m drinking it too.

Same thing’s gotta be true for you, man. You have to live the message, whatever the Simpleology message is, you have to be the greatest student of it. People ask me all the time, “Russell, how come you’re still launching funnels every month?” Because I have to be the funnel guy. I gotta be the one doing this, or else no one else is going to do it. The reason why Lead Pages stopped having success is because Clay Collins stopped building Lead Pages. He stopped building pages and generating leads. That’s it.

Why did Clayton Mass stop having success with Infusionsoft? He quit building marketing campaigns. Why am I winning at Clickfunnels? Because every single day we’re launching a new funnel. Every single day I’m in, I’m building it, I’m doing it, I’m showing people. I have videos of me building funnels, talking about the strategy. I’m doing it, I’m living it. I have never once seen you login to Simpleology and do something. So I don’t believe that you actually use it in your life.

If I did, then I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, I want what Mark’s got.” And I do, I have so much respect for you. I see you and I’m like, some of the things you, like when you were in Boise and we were doing the ring stuff and you were eating just one salad a day. I literally to this day, since you left I eat one salad a day, almost perfectly, because you did that. And you taught, just like I connect with you, I want to be Mark, other people will do that as well, but you gotta be doing it. Whatever you’re preaching, and teaching, and showing in Simpleology, you have to be doing it.

People see me build funnels multiple times a week. That’s why they buy Clickfunnels. So the first part of every mass movement is they have a charismatic leader who is the hyper fan, they’ve drunk the Kool-aid the most. They are the cheerleader, I always tell people I’m the dancing monkey onstage. And every single day I am preaching about the thing that I believe in. And that message doesn’t end.

I think the biggest problem I had the first decade and a half of my business was that I was jumping from thing to thing to thing to thing and when I set down my roots and said, “I am the funnel dude and all I’m going to talk about for the next 20 years of my life is building funnels.” That’s when the people came. That’s when the masses came. That’s when it went from just being a one off, another product launch and made a quick million bucks, to this is something that’s important and that matters. So that’s the first thing for your mass movement, the charismatic leader. And again, we could geek out and go so deep on that and how it works, but the biggest thing is that people need to see you drinking the Kool-aid, and then they will follow you. They will plug in and they will start following you.

Alright number two, the second tier in my little triangle thing is that people move toward a future based cause. So in Expert Secrets book I show a whole bunch of different political elections and it’s fascinating. Almost with 100% accuracy, whichever political candidate talks about improvement, “We’re going to improve things.” They lose to the person that talks about the future based cause. It’s fascinating.

Obama talked about change. And I can’t remember, but in the book I have like so and so running against Obama and he said this, which is like, “We’re going to improve upon this thing.” And Obama’s like, “We’re going to change.”

Trump is like, “We’re going to make America great again.” Every person that wins is like, “We’re going to change what’s happening.” People want change, they want to shift, they need to believe that the future of where they’re going is the big thing. That’s the big shift.

So for me, it’s like when someone comes in Clickfunnels, yeah, it’s software, but I want them to set down roots here and to be here. I have to give them things to shoot for. So one of the biggest things we did initially was the Two Comma Club award. What’s the ultimate result someone gets from building a funnel? They make a million dollars inside a funnel. So we have to reward that and put it onstage and make a pedestal for people to move towards it. It’s a future based cause, like “This is where we’re going.”

The slogan, the motto we have in Clickfunnels is “One funnel away”. I get teased and ridiculed by the big time marketers because of that. They always tease me like, “Hey Russell, you’re one funnel away. Ha ha.” I’m like, “Dude, that mantra, that calling card makes me more money per day than you guys make in any of your product launches.” People need to have that, they need to have this thing. So they’re moving towards one funnel away like, “I can do it. I can do it.” And then the big goal they want is to make a million dollars inside a funnel.

So we created an award, as you know, the Two Comma Club Award. And people they aspire to see that. They want to move towards that and they visualize it and they, people, literally we had Dana Derricks took a magic marker and drew a picture of the Two Comma Club on his sheetrock wall so he could see it every day until he actually won the award and then he covered that thing up. People have this future based cause they’re moving towards. And when they have that they start moving toward it.

So my question is if someone comes into Simpleology, what’s the result I’m trying to get? Because if I can’t define, if I can’t see it, they’re not going to stick. For me to get more time, that’s good, but what does that mean? To get more things done, that’s good, but what’s the future based cause? It’s got to be something that they’re shifting away from. It can’t be like, “I’m trying to make, I’m going to get this thing better.” I’m going to talk about that more in the next one here, but the future based cause is the key.

For me, I’d be like if I was joining Simpleology, the big thing, the big campaign, what’s the….sorry I’m kind of struggling to get this out because I want to make sure I’m saying it right. Like pretend like you as the leader of the Simpleology world, you’re running for president right. And you’re standing onstage saying, “We’re going to make America great again.” That’s what we need, a political slogan.

So it’s like, “Hey when you join Simpleology blah.” “When you come to Funnel Hacking Live you’re just one funnel away. We’re going to show you exactly what that funnel is.” It’s me showing them that “this is the future, we’re going to help you get there.” And then we have something, some carrot to get them to that thing. What’s the award, what’s the prize, what’s the thing? People sign up for Insanity, a workout to go kill themselves, and they do it because they want a t-shirt at the end. That’s the goal they’re moving towards.

So for me it’s like, when I join Simpleology, what’s the political campaign that you’re giving me? What’s going to happen to my life? How am I shifting? And then what’s the thing that I’m chasing at the end?’

Alright so number one was leader, number two was future based cause, and the third part of this little triangle is you’ve got to create a new opportunity. This really does tie back to the whole category thing in the very first part that I talked about. But it’s interesting, and again, if you read Expert Secrets I go deep into this, but every offer there are one of two things. One is an improvement offer, where you’re helping someone be better, stronger, faster, smarter, or there’s new opportunity. People don’t like to buy improvement. They think they do, but they don’t.

Only like 5% of people in the world want improvement. It’s people like me who are geeking out. Who when you speak super high level I’m like, ‘Plug me into that. I need more of that.” But the rest of the masses, the 95% plus of the world, they’re not into improvement. That’s why improvement offers never convert well. What does convert well are new opportunities.

So I always look at, what’s the end result that my customer’s trying to get? If they’re coming to Simpleology they’re trying to get some result. So it’s more time, it’s more energy, it’s whatever, again, whatever you define that big thing as that we talked about earlier. Bu then it’s like, what are the other vehicles they’re using to try to get that.

So if I was in the weight loss market I’m like, “Okay, they’re using a ketogenic diet to get there.” or “They’re using Atkins.” Or “They’re using paleo” or what’s the carnivore one? The carnivore diet. There are all these different vehicles to try to get that result.

So my job when I make a new offer is saying, basically saying, “Look, this is the goal you want. You’ve tried all these things, and I’m not here to tell you I’ll make a better work out plan or faster or whatever..” {inaudible}in the verb it’s an improvement offer. It’s like, “I’m shifting everything. You need this other thing it’s called a funnel. You need this other thing, it’s called blah.” What’s the new opportunity you’re promoting, you’re giving them? It’s all about creating new opportunities. I could go on that, I could do a two day event just on new opportunities, it’s so important.

But that’s a big concept. Simpleology needs a new opportunity. What are they currently doing to try to get this result and what’s the new opportunity you’re plugging them into? Because if you have a better task management software, you’re an improvement offer. If you have a better way to get things done, a better way to manage your projects, you’re new opportunity. You’re not a category king. Anyway, so that’s the big thing. How do I transition everything I’m doing from improvement to opportunity? Shifting to opportunity.

Alright, so that’s the first four. Number one was becoming category king, number two was the charismatic leader, number three was future based cause, number four is new opportunity.

Alright the number five thing we’ll talk about is how to sell. So one thing I’m going to tease you about, hopefully that’s okay, is on your thank you page you said, “Nearly one million users and growing, most all through word of mouth” which means you’re bragging that you’re not spending money on ads, which makes me want to cry because if you want to get to a billion dollars, you’ve gotta start spending a lot of money on ads.

So I don’t want to use that as like a war trophy, that it’s all word of mouth marketing. I want to use the trophy of like, we’re spending a million dollars a month in advertising, that’s a better trophy. Because that means you are everywhere and people can’t get away from you, which is where we’re at right now. It’s like, that’s a badge of honor that I want to put on myself because it means I’m everywhere, which is the goal. I want to just infiltrate. If I want to change people’s lives, I want to make sure that anywhere they look, I’m there reminding them consistently that I’m there.

So I’m going to walk you through the funnel of how we had success with Clickfunnels. What we did initially was we pushed everyone to a free 14 day trial and a couple of things happened. Number one is we could not buy traffic to Clickfunnels.com, which is I am sure what happened here. You have a 30 day free trial, so you’re spending money the whole 30 days, and it’s hard to get the money back.

Then we did an affiliate launch with that, and affiliates wouldn’t promote because they’re like, “Well, so how do I get paid.” I’m like, “You get paid, in 30 days you get your commission.” They’re like, “That’s too long away.” Affiliates attention span is short. And then my ability to spend money on ads and wait that float, it was low. So we kept trying and it didn’t work, didn’t work, didn’t work. So then we shifted to a webinar model where we sold Clickfunnels, we made a thousand dollar version of Clickfunnels, where they got at the time, it was 12 months of Clickfunnels for a thousand bucks, plus a bunch of other cool things in the offer.

We launched it that way, what happened is we made a webinar, make a whole bunch of money. But then we were in this launch game where we made 100 grand this week, and then nothing the next week. Then 100 grand the next week, and nothing the next week. I was like, I don’t want Clickfunnels to be launching business either, because I’m going to get tired eventually and I don’t want the money to stop.

So we kept trying funnel after funnel after funnel and then this was the secret sauce, this is what made CLickfunnels blow up. All the ads we drove were through a webinar. All the affiliate promo’d through webinar, everything through webinar. The webinar would happen, we’d sell the thousand dollar version, and we’d make a big pop of cash. And that big hunk of cash up front would pay off the ad cost, it’d pay off the affiliate, it was awesome. But then what was interesting, on the thank you page, after they registered for the webinar, I had a little video that said, “Hey thank you so much for registering for the webinar. Before you show up, I’m going to be showing you how to use this new cool tool called Clickfunnels. Go get a free 14 day trial right now, go play with it a little bit, then show up on the webinar and I’m going to show you how to use it.”

That was it. And what started happening, is that for every one person that paid for the thousand dollars on the webinar, 3 would sign up and stick in the trial. So what did that mean? That meant that after the first 12 months we had 2500 people that paid the thousand dollars. We made 2.5 million dollars from that, but we had 7500 who had joined the trial and stuck, and then the other 2500 people, so we had 10000 end of year one, who were now paying $97 monthly. Which made, what’s that? A million dollars a month.

And that was the big secret, because we were able to get the upfront cash to cover affiliates and cover ads, and then we got the long term cash from all the residual continuity. And that blend is what made Clickfunnels blow up. Because now we can spend more money than anybody else in the world and it was just like, it was, when we figured that out, it was on like donkey kong. I was literally doing three plus live webinars a day, multiple times a week.

And we were doing it with affiliates, doing facebook ads, doing google ads, doing Youtube ads, doing more affiliates, doing everything we could to get the momentum. Because you know what it is, when an offer is hot, it’s hot and you want to run with it as fast and as hard as you can. I did that every single day for a year, a live webinar, and then at that point we started automating it more, because I got tired. But to this day I can still tell that webinar word for word.

Okay, so that’s kind of the funnel we used. So for you, I’d recommend the same thing. After you really identify what your core message is with Simpleology, what you’re going to be the category king in, really identifying you as the leader, what things you’re going to share. What are the pieces of your personality you want to bring out? Then it’s like, this is the funnel and webinar I would use to sell, to really start blowing it up.

One thing I want to step back on, to number two when we talked about the charismatic leader. I know Justin Brooke asked this in one of the follow up comments, it was just kind of something about who, or that was the first comment, who are you now, Mark? Are you a fitness guy, are you this, you this, you this? And you said something that was interesting, that you didn’t want to just pigeon hole it, like, “I do a lot of things.”

And what’s interesting, I look when I started this business it was very similar. I was, I had learned all the pieces. I learned copywrite, I learned Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO, PPC, all these different things. And so I would pride myself on, “Everyone else has a thing, and I’m able to do all things, and I can do all things better than them.” And it’s funny because I would go to events and people were like, “What do you do?” I’m like, ‘Oh, I do this and this…” and they’re like, “Okay, okay. That’s Jeff Walker, he does product launches.” Boom, they’d go to him, give him money. “Oh, there’s whoever, he does SEO.” They’d go give that person money. Then me, I’m like, “But I do all, I do all that plus this, plus…” And nobody wants to hire a generalist though, a generalist. They all want a specialist.

So it’s like, what do you specialize in. And literally for me, going from doing well to exploding was when I said, “I’m the dude who does funnels. That’s my thing, that’s my magic.” And then it was amazing because Clickfunnels blew up. And then my mastermind groups blew up. And then everyone on planet earth wants me to speak to be the funnel guy.

And it’s funny because it’s like, I still teach everything. I still teach how to, but I tag the word funnel to everything. So it’s like, “Here’s your funnel. I’m going to show you how to fill your funnel. So now you can go do traffic stuff. I’m going to show you how we do our follow up funnels. I’ll show you my email and communication.” I can start, I pick the thing that’s my thing that I can teach everything else around it.

I think for you it’s the same thing, you gotta figure out, this is the thing that I do. But then you can do all, you can still teach everything and be everything you want around it, it’s just figuring that thing out. Anthony Diclementi, when I first came to him, before he launched Biohacker’s Guide to Health and Energy, he was biohacking everything. So I was like, “What do you mean by hacking everything.” “You name it, I can do it all.” I’m like, “Well, what about this?” “Yes.” “What about this?” “Yes.” And he would literally do everything. Smartest dude I’ve ever met.

And then I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool. But who are we going to sell?” He’s like, “Everybody, I could sell anything. Any person you bring me I could fix them.” I’m like, “Let’s pick a focus. What are the two things that people want the most?” And he’s like, “For me, it’s focus and energy.” I’m like, “Boom, write a book just on biohacking for energy and focus. Because we can sell that entrepreneurs, we can sell it to whatever.”

And then he wrote this book and it ended up being like 8000 pages just on energy and focus. And it blew up, and now he gets clients coming in for energy and focus, but he’s able to work on all the stuff around that, but what’s he’s doing is like, “If you need energy or focus, this is the dude. He’ll biohack you to get your energy back, get your focus back.” And that was the core message most people wanted, but it brings him every client and case you can dream up. So for you it’s kind of the same thing. Sorry, I digressed, I should have shared in the leader part, I just got excited.

Alright number five is how to sell. And then number six. So I’ll go through what we got. Number one, becoming category king. Number two, charismatic leader. Number three, future based cause. Number four, new opportunity. Number five, the funnel structure, how to sell software. And then number six is front end funnels.

So as you probably know, if you look deep into what we do, Clickfunnels is a software platform, we sell Clickfunnels all day long and it’s awesome. But most of the money we spend nowadays, is either for the webinar we talked about earlier, or to different front ends. So my Expert Secrets book, my Dotcom Secrets book, my 30 Days book, my One Funnel Away Challenge, most of the money we spend is on front end funnels. Because front end funnels are easier to make your money back quick. I want less upsells inside of Clickfunnels, I want more upsells in front end funnels. So it’s the book funnels, things like that.

And I started thinking, you have so many assets, in fact I logged into Simpleology and I bought everything from day one. So inside my member’s area, let’s see if I can find my login real quick again. You have the whole section with all of, let me pull it up, with all the old stuff I bought. And I still remember, of everything you’ve ever sold, Legacy course, there it is, my favorite thing still is Simpleology 101. I love that program.

The law of straight lines, the law of clear vision, the law of focus and attention, that right there is an amazing front end you could sell for, it doesn’t even matter. It’s not about money, you can sell it $7, for $37, for $47, that training is already done, you did it like 10 years ago, it’s amazing. It’s in Adobe Flash, you’re going to have to update it because no one’s got flash anymore, but there’s people you can pay like $50 and they’ll turn it from flash into an actual video.

But Simpleology 101 is a front end funnel. Your Simpleology book, oh my gosh, that book is amazing by the way. Everyone should go and read it. And then you should go back and make a free plus shipping on Simpleology book and bring people through the upsell/downsell process.

But those front end funnels are what bring in customers for free, and then they get indoctrinated to you, to the attractive character, the future based cause, the new opportunity. And then from there, then they sign up in droves into your software.

Right now today, we get on average between 1500 and 1800 people a day that sign up for Clickfunnels. That means the go to CLickfunnels and they create step one of their account. From that we get between 800-1000 who fill in their credit card. So we get 800-1000 people a day that sign up for Clickfunnels, that aren’t tracked back to an ad. These are people who bought one of my front end funnels.

The front end funnel does all stuff I talked about earlier. It defines myself as a category king, it connects them to me as a charismatic leader, it shows them the future based cause so they have a vision of where they’re going, and it offers them a new opportunity, and funnels is the answer for me for all of my front ends. So every front end I have brings them back into Clickfunnels, brings them back.

So we spend insane amounts of money selling people these front ends, and then people come in droves to the software because of that. And my books aren’t like, we have friends that have written books that are just long form sales letters for whatever they sell, my book’s not that way. It’s a book. I barely, I thinkt he last page I’m like, “Oh by the way, if you want to use Clickfunnels it’s awesome. Click here.” But my book is not a sales, it’s just a book that indoctrinates them in what they need to believe, and then the answer is they have to have funnels. That’s just how it works. They come that direction.

I think you’ve got so many amazing front ends that are already done, that are sitting here, all these elective courses that you have that are amazing. The core course is the books, you’ve written some amazing books. The Irresistible Offer is still one of my favorite books. Simpleology is amazing. Mind Control Marketing, there’s so many. You got so much cool stuff that you can go through and start creating as front ends.

In fact, my biggest problem right now is I have so many Russell Brunson front ends out there that the marketplace is so saturated, here’s 800 Russell ads every single day. It’s like, right now we’re going and doing partnerships with other authors that have written books that I can tie back into Clickfunnels. They’re building out their whole free plus shipping funnels, just for the goal of getting a customer for free and then introducing them into Clickfunnels.

So number six is just taking all this amazing stuff you created over the past, and creating front end funnels with a goal of acquiring customers and then pushing them into the software.

So Mark, we’re almost an hour long. I hope there was some value here. I hope you got some ideas, I know there’s a lot. I’m going to kind of recap it really quick.

So my initial quick comments were going back to Simpleology and try to make it simple and have people opt into the complexity of the software. With upsells, taking out the upsells when people log in, stripping out almost all, maybe one upsell when somebody creates their account, but using the upsells later on in the front end funnels. And then really becoming more vulnerable, like let the significance drop, let the vulnerability open up and let people be connected to you, because Mark, you are one of the most fascinating and amazing people I’ve ever met.

And when you feel comfortable becoming vulnerable and opening that up to people, you’re going to get all the significance you’ve ever craved or dreamed for. So I hope that, yeah, that’s what I’ve been most nervous about sharing. But I hope, I think it’s the most important.

Then after that, the big core shifts. Number one is really focusing on what do you want to become the category king of, and this is not just the software. It’s the software, it’s the content, it’s all the stuff in this business of Simpleology. If you want to become a billion dollar brand I believe you have to be your own category. So I would read the book Play Bigger, which is all about category design, it’s amazing.

Number two, three and four, you should read the book Expert Secrets, it goes into detail, but it’s really about identifying yourself as a charismatic leader, finding your voice, figuring out exactly where in the market you’re going to be, where you’re going to become the person. Number two is figuring out your future based cause. Number three is how do you structure what you’re doing as a new opportunity. All those things you’ll get in the Expert Secrets book.

Then number five here is structuring how you sell and how you create an actual webinar, which by the way, the Expert Secrets book also teaches you how to structure the whole webinar. Go slide by slide through the whole webinar process. So that would be the next piece. Here’s how we structure the webinar to sell this amazing new opportunity you’ve created for people.

And then number six is after you’ve got the webinar up and running and sales are coming in and it’s coming back to these amazing assets you’ve already created in the past and turning them into awesome front ends. The Great Formula, that was the other one I couldn’t remember the name of. There you go.

Anyway, so I hope that helps. If l was to start a business from scratch today, those six things are the first things I’d be mapping out. What are we the category king of, what’s the attractive character, how do we identify that? What are their beliefs? What are we focusing on? Who are we the thing of? What’s the future based cause? What’s the new opportunity? How are we going to sell this thing? And what front ends could we also build to bring more blood and more traffic into our world?

I hope that helps man, I appreciate you. I’m grateful for you. So grateful that 15 years ago you were willing to be a marketer and to sell, and to sell aggressively and to convince me to part with money I didn’t have, because you gave me hope of a future that I didn’t even know was possible, that now is here and I’m so grateful for it. I’m grateful for you for making those sacrifices back before we had a million ebooks and training courses and things, back before we had Facebook ads, and the simplicity of driving traffic before Instagram, before all these amazing tools, you went out there and you were a pioneer. And you busted your butt and you cut your teeth and figured out stuff before any of us could.

And I’m always grateful for the pioneers that went before us, but I’m super grateful for you especially because you’re the one who had the impact on me and got me the shifts I needed to do in order to be successful in this business. I hope that in some way this gives back to you because you’ve given so much to me in my life.

So I appreciate you man. Hopefully everyone who’s been listening in on this podcast gained from it. And that you guys will have a chance to now, if you haven’t heard of Mark before, get connected with him, go follow him on Facebook, he’s an amazing human. Like I said, the original, the OG internet marketer back figuring this stuff out before any of us knew it existed.

So anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode. If so, please take a screenshot of it on your phone, post it on Instagram, and tag me and use #marketingsecrets and I don’t know if Mark’s even on Instagram. Let’s get him on Instagram as well. If he’s on Instagram tag him there too, if not go tag him on Facebook and tell him you appreciate him for the legacy he left and for all of us to kind of follow.

Thanks everybody, appreciate you all and we’ll talk to again on the next episode.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.